UTEP Professor: “Trump branded himself successfully from day one”
President-elect Donald Trump’s ability to brand himself successfully is being cited as one of the reasons the 70-year-old was able to pull off a shocking election upset.
A UTEP assistant professor of political science told ABC-7 Trump said something as simple as a red hat with the slogan “Make America Great Again,” may have made a huge difference.
“Politics is the art of branding, so much so, that when we show up to the polls and when we vote, after the top of the ticket, if we don’t know the candidates, what do we do? We look to R and D, because R and D means something,” UTEP Assistant Political Science Professor Dr. Todd Curry said. “R and D is a brand and politics is about branding, it’s about naming.”
Curry said Trump was much more successful than Hillary Clinton at branding.
“The ability that Trump had in the economic sense to brand himself in the way he did, in the fashion he did, was quite amazing and much more effective than what the Hillary camp did,” Curry said. “Hillary’s brand didn’t pick up in terms of a brand identity until later on in the campaign.”
Curry further stated Donald Trump’s branding was “existent day one when he announced he was going to run in the Republican primary.”
“If you brand yourself in an easy fashion, in a recognizable fashion, there’s nothing to say the differentiation of a red hat that say ‘Make America Great Again’ is anything different from a jingle that sticks in your head when you watch a commercial. They are the same thing and they’re supposed to have the same effect and Donald Trump did that significantly better than Hillary Clinton in this cycle,” Curry said.
The chairman of the Republican Party of El Paso agreed.
“It is a simple message and there was a lot of push back about whether we were going to ‘Make America Great Again,'” Adolpho Telles said. “I think if you look at what happened to the individuals, to the working class people, and you look at what has gone on over the last 7 or 8 years, people are not better off.”
